The American Scholar

Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous speech, The American Scholar is the quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932.

The American Scholar

Lionized • The life and death of a celebrity puma—and what it really means to be wild

Queen of the Castle • Looking for Mama Lou, the legendary singer whose work helped inspire American ragtime

This Is Not the Zombie Apocalypse • Is a new form of methamphetamine really to blame for a host of urban problems?

The Days After • Remembering Samantha Smith, the girl who dared to dream of peace at a time when so many feared a global war

The Interdisciplinarian • Evelyn Fox Keller has spent a lifetime in different scientific fields, while managing to shatter a glass ceiling or two

A Clean, Well-Ordered Place • An ode to the grocery store

The Grinberg Affair • One of Mexico's most curious missing-persons cases involves a scientist who dabbled in the mystical arts

A Turn to the Dark Side • Reckoning with 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most recently the Covid-19 pandemic has compelled historians to rethink the Civil War and its aftermath

Origin Stories • What we know of Flannery O'Connor's childhood—and how her views on race took shape—is incomplete if her caretaker Emma Jackson remains in obscurity

A Quicksilver Maker • THE WORLDLY VERSE OF LORNA GOODISON

Five Poems

Alphabet of Despair • The photographic language of Dorothea Lange conveyed order and beauty in a dusty, impoverished America

A Burning World • Can poetry truly supply the language to express the ineffable sensations of suffering and love?

Shostakovich in South Dakota • A manifesto for the future of American classical music

Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit

PATIENCE, PRACTICE, PERSEVERANCE • How Octavia E. Butler became a writer

CONNECT OR DIE • The high cost of going it alone

TO GET TO THE OTHER SIDE • Roads and the future of life on Earth

NATURALISTS UNKNOWN • Lives marked by discovery and erasure

THOUGHT EXPERIMENTERS • Making sense of a broken world

IT'S ALL GREEK TO HER • The woman who brought mythology to the masses

DOWN AND OUT • A woman excised from her eminent husband's story

THE LATE BLOOMER • Reconstructing a private poet's life

Commonplace Book

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